MOVIES:

• Looper. Rock-solid performances from Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Bruce Willis and Emily Blunt, a fun turn from Jeff Daniels (including the year’s best movie one-liner), and a plot that, while not scientifically consistent, delivered on the emotional arcs of all concerned while providing a healthy supply of action. Easily my favorite movie of 2012.
• Chronicle. I was gonna write something about how Chronicle is the only “superheroish” movie to really confront superhero tropes and how bullshit they frequently are, but someone else already did so, well, go read that I guess.
• Safety Not Guaranteed. Which, I suppose, makes two movies on my end-of-year favorites list that are about time travel, although the time travel is more of a side thing to the human stories they use it for. Which I prefer, frankly, to a dedicated time travel movie like Primer which simply seemed designed to give you a migraine.
• The Five-Year Engagement. I liked this because it was drawn-out and, for a romantic comedy that you know by design will have to have a satisfying ending, it was messy and relatively realistic about how real life so frequently gets in the way of relationships. Also it has a killer cast: Jason Segel, Emily Blunt (again? Is she gonna be in everything I like now? I mean, she was in The Adjustment Bureau and I liked that awfully), Alison Brie, Chris Pratt, Rhys Ifans… David Paymer, Jackie Weaver, Mindy Kaling… one could go on.
• Lincoln. I get the criticism that it is another movie about slavery that principally features white people, but that is not really a very astute criticism because this is not about slavery per se; this is a movie about politics, and how people are driven to use it to their ends, for good or ill. Daniel Day-Lewis lines up yet another well-deserved Oscar (unless Hugh Jackman gets it for Les Miserables, but that would be a traditional Oscar robbery) and Tommy Lee Jones steals every scene as Thaddeus Stevens.

TV:

• Key and Peele. It has been so long that I have had a sketch comedy show that I considered a must-watch that I almost forgot what it felt like, and it feels so good. Whenever anybody tells you a show other than Key and Peele was the funniest show of the year, this means one of two things: either they have not seen Key and Peele or they are A SECRET RACIST. Thus, Key and Peele is also useful for rooting out secret racism. I bet the Smothers Brothers couldn’t do that.
• Happy Endings. Not to dismiss more story-driven shows like Parks and Recreation or Community (both of which were brilliant this year, of course), but Happy Endings made Elisha Cuthbert into the funniest part of a very funny show, which seemed impossible a season ago, and besides it just packs more gags into every episode than just about any other show on television. Well, except
• Archer. Which has the same gag-per-minute ratio as Happy Endings or even better, plus an engaging ongoing plot line and, because it is animated, can do much wackier and more hilarious things. Burt Reynolds in real life is boring; Animated Burt Reynolds does kung fu.
• Fringe. Still epic in its last season as it barrels home to the close we’re all waiting for.
• Survivor. Two good seasons this year; One World had a clever gimmick, the worst human being in Survivor history in Colton, and a very deserving winner in Kim, who played an absolutely perfect game. Granted, against a male tribe who were total idiots, but even so. And then came Philippines, which, other than having a dreadful jury episode (after hopes were raised that this group of excellent and level-headed game players wouldn’t resort to being The Usual Bitter Jury) was as good as Survivor gets.
• Bunheads. Because it’s basically Gilmore Girls Earth-2 and really, there are few things I want less than that in this world.
• Game of Thrones. Because duh.

VIDYA GAMES:

• Dishonored. It is a first-person stealth game where you can teleport and the teleportation power is just about perfectly executed in the game’s control scheme. I was zapping all over the place in this game and loving the hell out of it, because the game astutely recognizes that, in real life, people rarely look up unless they are being alert and careful. The game’s level design gives you lots of freedom to pick your own path to your objectives, whether that is sneaking around like a clever bastard or murdering legions of schmucks with your awesome magic powers. Best stealth game since the original Thief.
• Mark of the Ninja. No, wait, this is the best stealth game since the original Thief – this 2D platform/sidescroller is a near-perfect stealth game, with lots of cool ways to play each level, gorgeous character animations (I was shocked to discover that Genndy Tartakovsky was not involved with the project as it felt very him), and a good storyline. Wonderful little game. I actually bothered to replay it, which I almost never do any more.
• XCOM: Enemy Unknown. So fucking good. Purists who whine about how it is not exactly like the original need to be hit with a baseball bat.
• The Walking Dead. Critics will complain that this was mostly an interactive movie rather than a game, but so what? It was a supremely involving interactive whatever-it-was – the relationship between Lee and Clementine felt so real as to be downright visceral as you watched it. So, so good.
• Civilization V: Gods and Kings. Although I hope they have at least one more major expansion for Civ V in the works before they move on to Civ VI, this expansion put a lot more of the complexity of Civ IV that was missing from the game and stuffed it back in. Civ V still isn’t as complex as IV was – but it’s getting there. (The AI could still be better, but Civ is always Civ no matter what.)

So occasionally I tweet something about a board game I have played recently and I got a few emails asking for more comprehensive run-downs, so why not.

The Great Zimbabwe is Splotter Spellen‘s latest game – it was introduced in September at the Essen games fair, and shipped shortly thereafter. (As an addendum to the Splotter post: they have, in the last year, become much more diligent about reprinting their popular games and you can now order most of their titles through their website. It is still quite pricey, to be sure, but you can get them.) I ordered it immediately because there is no Splotter title I have played that I have not loved immediately. The Great Zimbabwe does not break this streak.

At first glance, The Great Zimbabwe is your standard race-for-VPs game: you’re building temples to get VPs, very straightforward. But the trick is that everybody starts with a VP target of 20 – and then, as you start taking improvements to better yourself in the game (selecting a god who gives you a bonus, selecting a tribal specialist who gives you a different bonus, buying the craftsmen who let you improve the temples) your VP target to win the game increases, so now you are balancing advantages against your ability to win the game. On top of that, the game has a very clever economic engine, wherein most of the players’ expenses each turn for operating stores or purchasing specialist benefits are paid directly to other players – so maybe you take that mask carver early even though it’s going to increase your VP target, because now everybody will be buying masks from you, especially since early on you’re going to lay down mask carver shops near all the available wood and make it difficult for anyone else to get value from mask carving. Because you need that money to bid for turn order every turn and make sure you go first, so you get your pick of shops to improve your temples.

It’s all a very clever and wide-open economic game with an interesting area aspect to it – it’s not area control by any means, but it’s definitely area-influenced. Like most Splotters it gives you lots of options and strategies and generally leaves play options wide open. And like most Splotters, it is excellent. This was well worth the (stupid high) price.

Colonial debuted at Essen last year; there was a recent Kickstarter for a North American reprint, which then tied into the designer releasing “second edition” rules which – having played both versions now – are both much more well edited and balanced than the first edition was. The prominent issue from the first edition is still there – this is a game where “beat up the leader” is still very much a thing. However, it’s also not a game which falls into “takes forever” because of its beat-up-the-leader play; instead, it is a game that rewards cunning diplomatic skill, which is as it should be for a game which is fundamentally about European colonialism.

Gameplay features up to six identical “nations” playing a variety of cards each turn in player sequence. These cards each have two different abilities, which both limits player choice of action in an interesting way and which allows for a little improvisation during play (which is kind of neat, if you were planning to use the Explorer but then realize, hey, the Ambassador might be a better pick). You have a pool of wooden counters, which is your money when it’s in the bank and your colonists when they’re on the board and your ships when they’re in your fleets and your goods when you’re importing from the colonies, which is a very nice abstraction of bringing every aspect of colonialism down to raw economics.

Players can trade goods (their own or other players’ – the latter of which helps both players, which can be advisable at times), advance their science tracks to become better sailors or economic powers or what have you, take out loans for quick influxes of cash (which is both very useful and also limiting, because you can’t win the game while you have debt), explore the world to form colonies, emigrate your people to those colonies (or to other people’s, much in the way that Nieuw Amsterdam eventually became New York), inspire rebels to rise up against colonists, convert the natives to Christianity to prevent rebellions or, yes, go to war with other players. This last is particularly important because the method of winning the game is gaining ten prestige points, which are mostly gained by exploring or by establishing colonies, which would turn the game purely into a race – except that wars let you steal prestige points directly from other players. But there’s also a diplomacy track, and you have to play nice because you can’t declare war on somebody who’s further along the diplomacy track than you. (Or you can play dirty and then make up the difference by using ambassadors to bullshit your way back into acceptability.)

In case it’s not clear: Colonial absolutely oozes theme in a way that many Euros do not. There are all sorts of Eurogames about Europe colonizing the rest of the world and most of them are dry and boring affairs, but Colonial captures almost every aspect of the colonial race (yes, even slavery) and boils it down into mechanics that, while not quite simple, are elegant. There’s also a five-player “Nations” variant (that wasn’t balanced in first edition and, with the second, now works) that lets players take on special in-game powers to represent the Spanish, Portuguese, English, French and Dutch. I haven’t given it a go yet, but I am looking forward to it.

Florenza was… kind of disappointing. There are a lot of gamers out there who admire the gameplay of Caylus but wish it tied more closely to its theme, and so they create their own takes on Caylus’ pure, brilliant worker-placement engine but with more flavour, or at least more of what they consider flavour, and the result is always the same: a game that is not quite as good as Caylus is. (Lords of Waterdeep is an excellent example of this and one of the better attempts to turn Caylus into something more themey – but it’s just not as good a pure gaming experience as Caylus is, because the base game does not really offer the variant victory paths that Caylus does, so everybody just sort of does the same thing.)

Florenza is about merchant families building elaborate buildings in Renaissance-era Florence – I know what you’re thinking, “a Eurogame about merchants in Renaissance-era Italy? What are the odds?” Players build workshops that have powers on them that you can send workers to for things, just like in Caylus. You can build fancy monuments for VPs, just like in Caylus. And to make it more thematic, you compete for the skills of famous Renaissance-era artists and religious leaders, and since it’s set in Florence Assassin’s Creed players will recognize most of the names.

The problem is that Florenza gives players too many options in their worker placement. Worker placement, as a game mechanic, works when players are forced to compete for worker uses and have to decide where they want to place their worker on their turn because odds are the next time they get to place a worker, other players will have snapped up all of the other good stuff they’re considering. In Florenza, by midgame, each player has typically built 4-6 workshops, which means you can always get a lot of resources for your workers – and the area where you send workers to trade resources for other resources (so you can get the right combination of resources to build the Big Fancy Building That Gets You A Lot Of Points) is non-exclusive so you can just send a worker there any time. Which means that in the core of the game, there isn’t that much tension – and without that tension it just becomes an exercise in cubepushing.

To start off, I want to make a quick plug for Pro Wrestling X, a video game that’s been in development for over ten years, whose developers are doing a Kickstarter fundraiser to for the money needed to complete the project.  I don’t know if they’re gonna get up to 75 grand by next week, but I believe in what they’re trying to do, and I hope they someday address some of the issues I’m about to list.

Anyway, like many wrestling fans I’ve spent the past month playing WWE ’13, and it’s been a lot of fun.   Still, I can’t help but notice that my “wish list” for features in the next game is virtually unchanged from last year, and the dozen or so years before that.  The progress from Wrestlemania Challenge to War Zone to No Mercy has stagnated, and fans are left to basically buy the same game every year with a new roster.  I could probably be okay with that, if not for the following thirteen sticking points:

13) I need new foreign objects, and a cup of soda isn’t good enough.  Steel chairs, kendo sticks, and sledgehammers are fine, but it seems like we could add in some new stuff one of these days.  It’s been years since I’ve been able to waffle a guy with a fire extinguisher, let alone spray it all over him.  Other weapons that would be awesome: chains, baseball bats, thumbtacks, and Mad Dog Vachon’s artificial leg.

12) Apparently midgets and giant fat guys are too unrealistic for pro wrestling.  I haven’t yet tried to make Giant Haystacks, but past experience suggests I won’t be able to get him any bigger than Husky Harris.  The minimum height for a create-a-wrestler is around 5’2″, which is a bit silly since the game is based on a property that heavily features a little person playing an insane leprechaun.  I realize allowing extreme sizes plays hob with the grappling animations, but since those haven’t changed much in 15 years you’d think the developers could experiment a little.

11) I guess nobody at THQ has ever seen facial hair.  There are dozens of bears, mustaches, and sideburns available in the game, and most of them look like your wrestler’s face was dusted for fingerprints.  If you’re trying to make “The Boogie Woogie Man” Jimmy Valiant he’s gonna end up looking more like one of the Fabulous Ones.

10) Why can’t I walk to the ring with my title belt hanging out of my pants like a penis?  Credit where credit’s due, WWE ’13 has a very nice interface for creating your entrance in exacting detail.  You can customize the lighting, the music, the pyro…but if you’ve won a championship, you can’t see any of that stuff.  Instead you walk out with one of a dozen fairly bland entrances that allow a belt to be rendered on your waist.  Actually, the belts float in the air in a circle five inches wider than your waist.  Yeah.

9) Minigames.  I hate these.  If you want to kick out of a pin, refuse to say “I quit,” or answer a ten-count, you have to get your timing just perfect and press the X button at the right time.  Either I can always get the timing right (meaning I could survive being hit by a car) or I never can (meaning I could get beaten with one armdrag).  It’s stupid because the experience in no way simulates the feeling of overcoming adversity to keep fighting.  On the other hand, the submission hold minigame–which as near as I can tell involves frantically mashing buttons–feels very much like I am struggling to survive, and I’m a big fan of that.

8) There are more championships than wrestlers.  THQ is very fan-friendly when it comes to providing alternatives to the current championship belts in WWE.  If you don’t like the WWE title with the spinning logo, you can use Steve Austin’s custom belt, or the old school ’80s version–or you can make your own belt with a lavender strap like the Ultimate Warrior did.  The only problem is that now you’ve got fifteen world champions.  What they should have done is set it up where there’s exactly one WWE championship, but the champion can wear one of fifteen belts.  They actually did it that way a few years ago, so I have no idea why they screwed it up this time.

7) Demolition isn’t in every game, but Jack Swagger is.  This is more a beef with the sorry state of wrestling than with wrestling video games.  Every new game has the current roster in it, and that used to be a selling point because the latest roster tended to be the best roster.  Nowadays, though, WWE ’13’s biggest selling point is that half the roster is made up of legends from 1998.  Which is great, except that it makes you wonder why the other half of the roster can’t be all-stars too.  Who the hell is buying these games to play as David Otunga, or John Laurinaitis, or Santino Marella?

6) The commentary sucks and you can’t turn it off.  There are sound options in the game, and I immediately turned “voice volume” down to 0.  Doesn’t help.  You still hear the same robotic lines that Michael Cole and Jerry Lawler have been reciting for years.

5) “AS GOD AS MY WITNESS, HE IS BROKEN IN–and he’s back up!”  Nobody stays down.  Ever.  You can be wrestling frigging Hunico, hit him with your finisher, throw him off the top of Hell in a Cell, and do a Superfly splash onto him from 20 feet in the air…and he will still be back on his feet within thirty seconds.  There’s no room to breathe in these matches–you have to stay on the offensive constantly to stay alive–and that makes it overly difficult to do any really fun spots.  I’ve always wanted to beat down my opponent, throw him onto the announce desk, and then do a crazy dive on him from a ladder set up in the ring.  But I’ve never been able to do that because as soon as I set up the ladder he’s knocking it down, and as soon as I get him on the desk he’s coming around to jump back off.

4) They still can’t do group entrances right!  You can set up Road Dogg and Billy Gunn as a team in the New Age Outlaws, but you can’t set up the New Age Outlaws as a part of D-Generation X.  Of course, if you could do that, Road Dogg and Billy would do their team entrance acting like Triple H and Shawn Michaels, because DX can only do one team entrance regardless of which two guys are entering.  The game has a few custom entrances designed for a male tag team and their female valet, but those only work if they’re all wrestling.  This is kind of a nitpicky thing, but it baffles me that after all these years and all these souped-up consoles, they still couldn’t do Randy Savage and Elizabeth’s entrance right if they tried.

3) It is entirely too hard to write “DUSTY SUCKS EGGS” on a T-shirt.  All right, so my brother broke his leg last month, and I came down for Thanksgiving to play WWE ’13 with him.  So being the loving sibling that I am, I wanted to make my create-a-wrestler a shirt that says “I BROKE BUTTDAWG’S LEG,” in the tradition of Greg Valentine’s feud with Wahoo McDaniel.  So I go in to edit the shirt, and I add lettering.  “I…” nuts, I can’t make a space, I have to stop and make the next word a separate layer.  “B-R-O-K-E…” this is so tedious.  “B-U-T-T-D-A-W-G-,-S…”  Wait, I can’t even make a damn apostrophe?  I’m not even getting into the hassle of resizing the text to fit in the shirt.  Suffice to say it would almost be easier to go to the mall in the ’80s and make an actual tacky custom shirt.

2) At no point do I feel like I am in a real fake wrestling match.  WWE ’13 has some real improvements in chain wrestling and reversing holds, but it still feels nothing like wrestling a match, in the fake world of WWE.  My finishing move never finishes the match.  Big dramatic high spots are exactly as effective as doing a simple suplex.  Nobody taps out to the anklelock–you have to do it nine times before the other guy even starts to sell his leg.  Ladder matches never see crazy stacked-up-ladder spots, because the ladders always get knocked down before that can happen.  If I hit a guy with a steel chair, he always gets right back up, and the ref always sees it.  I read the game has a special referee mode, and if you’re the referee and you don’t follow the rules, you’re ejected from the match, which has happened approximately zero times in the history of special referee matches.  In many ways THQ’s wrestling games have done a fair job simulating a real combat sport, but since this is pro wrestling, that kind of misses the point.

1) It’s two-thousand twelve and I can’t get seven people on the screen at the same time.  I don’t mean to be unfair–I realize that there are technical limitations that cause the program to slow down when too many guys are moving around in the ring.  Thing is, I realized that in 2001, when it was a technical limitation on the Playstation Two.  You’d think at some point somebody would invent some awesome graphics chip that would let you do a ten-man Survivor Series match, or at least do a six-man with an actual referee in the ring.  I’m pretty sure other sports games would not be content to settle–I don’t hear about Madden NFL featuring only two offensive linemen because it’d be too difficult to render all eleven players in a team.  And yet THQ seriously wants me to believe I can get by with just Three Horsemen.

Almighty Kfish: Any thoughts on the cancellation of Hellblazer?

I, personally, am looking forward to the PG-rated adventures of John Constantine! I cannot wait for John Constantine to start talking like a mid-90s Pete Wisdom and call baddies “ruddy plonkers.” Also, when he defeats the Devil with the power of friendship, and then he and Superman go out for waffles and talk about their women problems. “How do I tell Wonder Woman – who I am dating – that I do not get the point of her invisible plane?” “Oh, Supes, you plonker, you don’t know nuffink, cos my lady Zatanna, she wears these fishnets all the time and then when it is time for romance, she takes them off!” Seriously, who will not love this?

Andrew Miller: Or – for something off the wall – a discussion of why Western pop-culture audiences find tropes taken from medieval Japan – ninjas, samurai, etc. – appealing, while tropes taken from other times and places – India before the English, sub-saharan Africa, the Aztec Empire, etc. – find so little traction. I have a pet theory it has to do with Japan being the one place where European imperialism was felt the least, but I wonder what your thoughts are.

Well, Western fascination with Japanese culture started out as a fad in the 1880s and never really stopped. That was when samurai first became popular with western audiences, and ninja followed shortly thereafter. This is mostly for two reasons. Firstly, samurai and ninja translate fairly simply to Western audiences because you can – inaccurately – just make them into knights and spies, both of whom were popular fiction tropes even back when Japanese concepts were first introduced. Secondly, your imperialism theory is fairly accurate – because Japan was never really conquered in the colonial era it remained exotic, whereas, say, the Mughal Empire were just the guys the British beat up and took India from, and it’s hard for imperialist cultures to really get impressed with the guys who they defeated. That was really why Japan became such a fad in the first place.

Miles: My group of friends have really enjoyed Through the Ages, if you have time for a Civilization-type game.

I don’t mind Through the Ages, but it’s not a “Civilization-type game.” Through The Ages is a tech-tree game, which is not quite the same thing. A proper civ-game has exploration, military conflict, a reasonably complex economic engine and a tech-tree. Through The Ages has a great tech-tree mechanic which is ninety percent of the game, then a very simple economic engine to power the tech-tree, dumbs down military conflict to “make sure you have roughly the same number of troops as everyone else, because the game favours the defender overwhelmingly” and has no exploration whatsoever. Oh, and of course it’s just yet another Euro that you win only by getting victory points, and although I don’t get offended by VP-racing like some gamers do, a proper civ-game should offer up more options for victory than “get the most VP.”

I much prefer the new Sid Meier’s Civilization boardgame (the one by Fantasy Flight) for when I want a proper civ-game experience. It is, to be sure, a bit clunky in terms of its rules because it tries to adapt virtually every aspect of the computer game series into a boardgame, but: it has a good tech-tree, exploration and board control is absolutely vital to winning, the military race matters a great deal, and it has multiple victory conditions. Also, it does the “each civilization gets its own distinct special powers” thing, which I am always a sucker for because I love variable player powers in games – they offer up so much additional headspace. So that is usually my civ-game of choice. (If I want something quicker and lighter than SMC for a civ-game, I will generally go for Olympos.)

Thornae: I’d like to add another vote for the webcomics thing – what are your current weekly reads?

Nothing earth-shattering – I tend to read webcomics in chunks-at-a-time rather than weekly. XKCD, Penny Arcade, Girls with Slingshots, and Chainsawsuit (which is the funniest comic Kris Straub has ever done, by far) are about the only comics I read as-they-come. No, wait – I admit that I sort of hate-read Menage a 3 regularly. I love Gisele’s art – it’s a near-perfect marriage of classic Dan DeCarlo-style blending-of-good-girl-art-with-Archie-storytelling and anime tropes – but the fact that every single character in the comic is a terrible person and the strip doesn’t seem to get that just blows me away. I mean, I admire the strip’s dedication to normalization of the broad range of human sexuality, but Gary is a pathetic, unlikeable wimp, Didi is apparently completely amoral, Zii is incredibly irritating, Yuki is basically the worst person in the entire world, and if Dillon were straight his neverending gay crush on Gary would be even creepier and predatory than it already is, and believe me I could go on at length. But the art is lovely, so I keep reading it and hating myself for it – and it’s not because it’s porn, because it’s not even very good at being porn because the decision to avoid showing genitals is distracting.

(Also, if the sound of someone blowing a guy is “mf mf mf mf” then – I dunno. All I am saying is: I have received my share of oral sex, and I would not say that “mf mf mf” is onomatopoeiacally correct.)

Al: Ever had to give a best man speech? Any good stories about it, or advice to give?

I’ve never been a best man, but I have made speeches at a few weddings as a friend of the couple, and it’s not really a forum to show off how dazzling and brilliant you are as a speaker, frankly. It’s not about you, it’s about them. Think of two or three good anecdotes in the neighborhood of “embarrassing, but not mortifying, just funny/cute” (you can invent details out of whole cloth if they make the story better, because nobody will challenge you on this), chain them together, say that you’re happy to see them together and explain why, raise your glass, done.

I was at DragonCon last weekend when I found out that City of Heroes is being closed down. (I was also at DragonCon last weekend when I was supposed to be making last week’s post, which is why, along with some boring work-related stuff, you haven’t heard from me in a while. But I digress.) It’s hard to really describe how I feel about this news; I don’t really have a whole lot to analogize it to. I was too young to be in organized fandom when ‘Doctor Who’ was canceled, and I had already lost a lot of my emotional investment in ‘Buffy’ by the time it went away. Even situations like the sunsetting of the WotC Star Wars TCG, or the various times that I’ve seen Shadowfist look like it was going to go the way of all flesh don’t apply, because I still had the cards I’d already bought. I can’t get new Netrunner expansions anymore, but WotC didn’t come to my house and burn my collection. This feels more like finding out that a new highway is coming through my neighborhood. My house isn’t being wrecked, but a lot of the places where I spent time with my friends over the last seven or eight years aren’t going to be there anymore.

Even if the game does go down, though (and I know of and approve of the various efforts to save the game in one form or another) I think that the people who worked on it can take a lot of pride in what they did over the last eight years. City of Heroes might not have been one of the biggest MMOs out there, but its influence was out of proportion to its subscriber base. It was the first MMO to really push the idea that you shouldn’t punish people for playing your game; lenient death penalties, casual-friendly loot systems, and a grouping design that pretty much everyone in the industry scrambled to emulate made it clear that MMOs could, if done right, appeal to a large audience. It might be an exaggeration to say that MMOs might be a much smaller genre without City of Heroes, but I don’t think it’s wrong.

I’m trying not to be angry at NCSoft over this. I’m certainly not a satisfied customer, and I don’t think they see it from the same perspective as I do, but I think it’s about as useful to get mad at a company for making a business decision as it is for getting mad at a shark for biting you. NCSoft is a business, their goal is to make the most money they can. They think something else will be more profitable than CoH is for them currently, and they have the numbers to back that up. I can get upset over that, but I can’t really argue with it. In some ways, I think the saddest thing about all this is the way that it’s revealed an ugly vein of racism in the fan community, as some people are muttering darkly about how the Korean-based NCSoft is somehow doing this because they don’t like their American playerbase. I know these people are upset, and I can sympathize with that anger, but that doesn’t make what they’re saying right or appropriate. They’re doing what any company does, trying to find the most profitable investment of their funds. City of Heroes is profitable, but it’s not a cash cow and it’s never going to be. Do I wish NCSoft cared more about its fans and the wonderful development team that have put years of effort into this game? Of course. But companies don’t work that way.

I know that if the various efforts to save the game fail, I’m going to spend a lot of time missing Paragon City and the Rogue Isles. But I think what I’m dwelling on most right now, though, is the lost potential. I was still creating characters up through about three weeks ago, taking advantage of the new powersets and looking forward to the next issue (I already had an idea for a Chow Yun-Fat inspired Dual Pistols/Martial Combat blaster.) So many things that were teased and hinted at now may never be revealed. (Although I have to confess, I’m amused by the speculation that the “Coming Storm” and the mysterious enemy referenced over the last several issues was, in fact, the end of the game world at the hands of the developers.) Playing City of Heroes was always fun, but more than that, it seemed like a world of limitless possibilities that stretched out into the future. That’s gone, now, even though the memories are always going to be great ones.

What will I do with the time I spent playing City of Heroes? I don’t know. I probably won’t pick up another MMO. The setting was always a big part of the draw for me, and Champions Online never caught my interest in the same way. (As for DC Universe Online…I think I played it for five minutes, but that was only because it took me four minutes and thirty seconds to figure out how to quit.) I’ve already backed up my characters (thank you, mad genius who invented the character export tool!) and I’ll probably move on to other interests, and wait for the day when someone’s fond memories of this are strong enough that they make the game live again. Because to me, this game is worth waiting for.

Christian: Let’s assume DC’s movie efforts and Justice League series continues to hit snag after snag (likely), and by some cosmic twisting of events it all gets dropped in your lap. You’re given the mandate to reboot their efforts marvel style, but with one catch. Their needs to be a villain behind all of the plots in the various movies, but not one of the biggies everyone knows (no Lex Luthor or Brainiac for you). You’re mandated to take some low-level DC villain, and realistically ramp him up to being a threat for the big team. Who is your guy in that scenario?

I already cast my vote for Starro last week. If I need a second choice: Per Degaton. (Who, incidentally, was someone I always wanted to go up against the Legion of Super-Heroes, but never mind that.) Degaton easily translates to movies because he’s just a normal dude who happens to be a time-traveling tyrant, which gives you a lot of license to do awesome stuff and gives him an excuse to be anywhere doing anything, because of causality requiring him to be there at that point.

Also, the costume redesign he got in Johns’ JSA is really cool and would translate to real-life costuming very well.

Andrew Miller: If you could make one improvement to transit in Toronto, what would it be?

A downtown relief subway line in the east. The greatest operational stress point for the TTC is its heavy use along the Yonge line – another north-south line intersecting with the Sheppard line, Bloor/Danforth line and terminating at, say, Union would vastly expand TTC subwya coverage with only a few new stations and make the Yonge line far more rideable.

After that, in order: light rail transit along Finch, extending the Sheppard line to Downsview, light rail along Eglinton.

Pantsless Pete: Captain Marvel was a better character and comic than Superman and if not for his destruction via lawsuit his dominant market postion would have meant we ended with better comics today: Discuss.

I like Captain Marvel (not “Shazam,” – Jeebus, DC, what the hell is wrong with you). But a better character than Superman? The dude is a G-rated Superman clone, no ifs ands or buts about it; yes, he makes the child’s power fantasy more explicit, I suppose, and certainly Superman does not have a talking tiger buddy (memo to DC: have Superman be friends with a talking animal of some kind. Or, alternately, Rex the Wonder Dog), but this is all icing on the cake rather than the actual cake, and Superman is the real deal. Really, this isn’t even a contest.

Rbx5: Which, if any, of the upcoming post-AvX Marvel books/creative teams are you anticipating?

I honestly don’t even bother with previews any more, really. I don’t have the energy, so everything comes as a large surprise unless it is too gigantic to avoid the hype (like AvX) or somebody mentions it to me in email or sends me a link to a ComicsAlliance article (like Hawkeye – which was fine, but Abhay Khosla nailed it when he pointed out the giant stylistic debt owed to Batman: Year One on that comic).

Really, it makes comics a little more enjoyable: everything is a pleasant surprise, because these days I expect things to be mediocre rather than good.

PaulW: Hogan’s Heroes but played straight.

The BBC already did this thirty-five years ago with Colditz. It’s certainly aged a fair amount, but it’s not bad.

Jack Pumpkinhead: How do you feel about Final Fantasy games? Ever played any, favorite game, etc?

I played FF Tactics, and then 7 through, and half of 8, and then I more or less quit. I’m mostly a PC gamer, and the Final Fantasy games are console games, and once I stopped consoling (which was about the time my original Playstation started gathering dust) Final Fantasy and I walked our separate paths, especially after fans of the series started getting weird about whatsername in 7. FFT is still one of my favorite games of all time, though, and I’d love to see/know about a decent PC port/homage of that game.

Also, there were not enough hats in it. Good games have hats.

Splotter Spellen is, in many ways, the boardgame equivalent of a supercar manufacturer like Pagani; it’s a small company that makes expensive, small-print run boardgames that, ruleswise, are of extremely high quality, and which have lovely components, but which are also geared towards serious, high-end users. Many of them are now permanently out of print and all are relatively difficult to find.

I happen to own four. (I have not, however, had a chance to play Roads and Boats yet, but it looks awesome because you get to draw on the board a la Empire Builder. Still, no play means I will save it for another post sometime.)

Indonesia is the easiest of the four to obtain; it is still in print (as it is arguably Splotter’s most popular game). Indonesia is a robust economic game with a lot of tweaks to it. The basic gameplay is simple: acquire companies, merge them for money, buy and sell goods for more money, and then research ways to make everything you do more efficient so you end the game with, surprise surprise, the most money. Unlike some economic games, however, there are so many variant tracks to make money with no clearly superior choice that the strategies become remarkably free-form. (One reason for this is that Indonesia offers each player the same number of “upgrades” to the various parts of the game, but there are so many upgrade options that nobody can upgrade everything, which means your choices of upgrade become a function of your playstyle and part of your overall strategy. This sort of dynamic is key to the design of most Splotter games.)

I won one game by dominating shipping lanes (and therefore earning money whenever anybody else sold goods); in another I saw another player corner the market on rice and meat and then merge them to corner the TV dinner market (yes, there is a TV dinner market in this game) and use the TV dinners to expand those cities that were placed to best advantage him, because only “his” cities had access to that crucial extra good, which meant those cities generated even more profit for him; in a third another player won with a combination of smartly placed shipping companies and oil production so that he was generating pure profit off his oil deliveries. Indonesia is a game with a lot of room to mentally maneuver, and it rewards deep play.

Greed Incorporated is an even more free-form economic game than Indonesia is, but it is the exact opposite sort of game from Indonesia. GI owes more to the Sackson classic I’m The Boss than your traditional hardcore economic game. Yes, there are companies producing goods and the primary way those companies make money is by selling those goods – but that’s not really the main game in GI. No: GI is meant to be a game simulation of pump-and-dump economics. You play the executive class, and you personally start the game with zero money: the way you get money is by forcing the companies you manage to fire you, at which point you collect a juicy golden parachute directly from the company’s profits. This means that all of the dealmaking and negotiation in Greed Incorporated becomes recognizing how to get ahead and create those situations where you will massively profit from a company’s impending bankruptcy. When you control more than one company, the dealmaking gets more and more intricate as you manipulate multiple companies to create massive, massive profits and then create downswings the very next year. Meanwhile, however, at the same time it becomes massively important that you be situated in multiple companies so that when these situations occur for other people, you can either profit from them or set yourself up to take over that company so you can profit even more greatly.

Meanwhile, as all of this is happening, the game also has a stock market to represent the values of the various goods you can produce, manufacture and sell – and the game is designed expressly to create bubbles in all of the goods and then pop them like whoa. Oh, and in order to win the game, it’s not simply about having the most money, because really, this is a game where you routinely end the game with over a billion dollars. No, the way to win the game is to use your money to buy the best toys, because GI is a game that recognizes that the only people that rich people envy are other rich people who have better stuff than them. Which means you bid against other players to buy the best toys (private jets, personal islands, trophy wives, et cetera) – but since whenever a toy gets bought, the next toy (which will be an even better toy in terms of winning the game) has as its opening price whatever the previous toy sold for. Which means that a lot of the battle for the best toys is about making other people overpay for a toy and then immediately buying a better one at the same price.

It’s a hilarious game, but unlike a lot of funny games, it’s a funny game that you can play completely straight because while it’s funny, it’s not “Munchkin funny” (i.e., not funny); the hilarity comes as you do horrible things to make money.

Finally, the most expensive Splotter Spellen game I own is Antiquity. An aside: people have often asked me why I hate Agricola. The answer is multiple: I hate Agricola because it’s largely a non-interactive game where you are primarily concerned with your own board, and I hate Agricola because although it offers the promise of variability (through the different worker/job cards) in truth it really doesn’t because Agricola’s scoring system is set up so that everybody is ultimately pursuing the same set of goals, and I hate Agricola because it pretends to be this brutal punishing game but it never follows through on that, and I hate Agricola because it is about fucking farming.

Dave Lartigue, when I mentioned playing Antiquity on Twitter, responded by saying “Antiquity is the game Agricola players think they’re playing.” Which is more or less accurate, I think. Antiquity is somewhere in between being a civ-game and a farming game, and the core of it feels like Agricola in that you are desperately trying to manage your resources and expand to win the game.

Except that:

1.) Antiquity forces you to think about sustainability. The game has a famine mechanic, which forces you to have more food every turn in order to avoid placing graves in your city (and graves are bad, because they take up space for your improvements and then start deactivating your improvements), but in order to get more workers or increase your territory around the city or even start a farm, you need to spend food to do so. The game also has a mechanic it calls “pollution” – when you harvest a resources outside of your city, you place pollution markers there to show that you have taken everything of value from that hex. On top of that, you have to place additional pollution counters within your “zone of control” outside your city every turn to represent the garbage and shit your city produces every turn. If you can’t place those counters? More graves! If you can’t place graves? You lose the game immediately. This tense race against the game’s clocks starts on turn one, and right from that point you constantly feel the famine and pollution breathing down your neck as you try to simultaneously expand and avoid collapse.

2.) Antiquity is much more interactive than Agricola. The game takes place on a single map; this means everybody is expanding into the same central territory and trying to claim resources as quickly as possible. It also means that expanding your territory to cross into other player’s territory becomes a vital aggressive tactic because now you can dump pollution into your opponent’s territory. One of the buildings allows you to trade resources either with the game (as per Settlers of Catan) or with other players, and since not everybody bothers to build this building, building it and operating it can effectively turn you into a bank for the other players.

and 3.) Antiquity forces you to choose your own victory condition. When you build a cathedral, you get to pick one of five patron saints to whom you will dedicate said cathedral. The saint you choose will give you a special power and determine how you will win the game. Since you typically don’t build the cathedral until a third of the game is over, this means you can alternately immediately begin building towards your first choice of win condition or pivot to a different one as need be. You can pick a deeply interactive win condition (completely surrounding one opponent with your own buildings in the countryside) or a totally isolationist one (build every city building in the game). Antiquity, unlike Agricola, lets you choose your playstyle and play to your strengths – if you can prevent your opponents from taking advantage of your weaknesses.

Someone recently asked me, vis-a-vis my previous comments on Kickstarting board games, if there were any Kickstarters I would recommend. And there is definitely one: the Pandasaurus Games reprint of Tammany Hall. For those who are unaware – which is most of you – Tammany Hall was an extremely-small-print-run board game which has become legendary among hardcore boardgamers because it’s A) supposed to be really good and B) extremely hard to find and thus very expensive.

Well, I happen to have a copy already! So let me confirm: it’s very good. It’s a sort of area-control game wherein each player is a major political player in 18th-century New York (it is, in some ways, Gangs of New York: The Board Game). Each turn you can either plunk down “ward bosses”, or a combination of ward bosses and immigrants (Irish, English, German or Italian). When you place immigrants on the board, you get political favour chips of the appropriate nationality.

Then, at the end of every four years, you have elections in each of the city wards, which are won by the player with the most votes. Votes are your ward bosses plus all of the political favour chips you choose to expend – but chips are expended in a sealed bid, which effectively turns each vote at least partially into a bluffing contest (“so, is he going to pull in his Irish favours here, or save them for ward 17?”).

That, plus some other clever mechanics (slandering opponents, the fact that the big winner of each election gets more VPs but then has to assign the special powers of the game to other players) make for a boardgame that is both extremely engaging and not too complex from a rules standpoint, but what I really love about Tammany Hall is that it captures the feel of political horse-trading almost perfectly, and the bluffing aspect of the game really seals that for me. (Also, you can make lots of jokes about English and Italians, if you are so inclined. Playing the game with friends of the appropriate ethnicities gets hilarious and lowbrow very quickly.)

Right now it’s a few hundred bucks short of making its Kickstarter goal for the base game, so it’s guaranteed to succeed. I highly recommend it – it’s a fantastic game.

(Also, other people should Kickstart Ogre so it gets to 700K and Steve Jackson promises to thus Kickstart Car Wars. I don’t care about Ogre, but I want me some Car Wars. With the long-awaited official rules for scaling gameplay up to Hot Wheels.)

Okay, that’s an attention-grabber of a post title, I will admit. After all, what I want to talk about might not exactly be a problem with Kickstarter exactly, but it’s definitely an issue. Bear with me.

So I was talking with a friend of mine who is a retailer of boardgames, and we were discussing the distribution side of the industry. If you did not know: the distribution side of the boardgame industry is remarkably fuckety. Basically every boardgame publisher is signing exclusive distribution deals, which in turn places retailers at the mercy of the distributors, and the distributors are not always brilliant. My retailer friend complained that he was at present completely unable to purchase Filosofia/Z-Man boardgames because the Canadian exclusive distributor was, in essence, not doing its damn job.

Anyway, this conversation eventually led its way to Kickstarter, and said friend dislikes Kickstarter even more than he does distributors because the entire sales paradigm, for him, gets screwed with. He has to constantly explain to people when he carries a formerly-Kickstarted product that, no, he doesn’t have the Kickstarter promo bonuses because those don’t come with the mass-market release. Each Kickstarter has its own, shall we say, eclectic release schedule. Reprints are never guaranteed and usually are not expected: Kickstarter products are one-shots. And this last element is especially problematic because good retailers depend on shelf stock to grow the business. After all, retailers – even those who smartly use the internet to promote their business wisely – need to compete with the Amazons and eBays of the world and the only way they can still do it is by having deep stock so that if you want X, they will most likely have X.

But the Kickstarter problem for boardgames goes beyond just retailers – it’s about boardgaming as a whole. Every new product depends on word of mouth. These are not products intended to create new gamers; they’re intended for an existing audience. Steve Jackson Games right now is Kickstarting a new super-deluxe edition of OGRE, their classic “one giant mega-tank versus an army” game – but how is this going to create new OGRE players? Shouldn’t the point of any new product launch be to both satisfy the target audience and expand the existing base? (I note that SJG has offered, as a benchmark goal that is still approximately $50,000 away, a “mini edition” of OGRE – AKA “the entry-level edition that new players might actually buy sight unseen.) Is anybody ever going to see super-deluxe OGRE on a shelf and think “let’s try that?”

Kickstarter is targeted-marketing that depends heavily on word of mouth. That’s fine for many things. But it worries me that it’s becoming a primary business model for game publishers, because I doubt that such a model is sustainable in the long run.

(previously, slightly less previously)

supergp: What game would you use to introduce a young kid to boardgames, and at what age?

Start them early (and this isn’t just me espousing the hobby, incidentally – any childhood dev expert can tell you that the problem-solving and analytical skills kids can pick up by playing boardgames will go a long way in their lives). You can start playing boardgames with kids as early as two thanks to games like Go Away Monster! (among others). Animal Upon Animal is a dexterity game first and foremost but there’s strategy to be found there (enough that I have played it with adults and had fun, albeit using variant rules); Geistesblitz never, ever stops being fun either, whether you are four or sixty-four. As kids get older you can introduce them to slightly harder stuff: Liar’s Dice, Blockers! or Zooloretto or even Ticket To Ride. And then you can get them into the big-name stuff like Settlers or Carcassonne.

Evil Midnight Lurker: Have you ever killed a man in Reno just to watch him die?

Seems like a waste of a perfectly good murder to do such a thing.

A2H: Will there ever be any more Who’s Who columns? And if not, would going over the Official Guide to the Marvel Universe be a possibility?

Yes to both. I was actually working on a fairly lengthy Who’s Who entry (one of the more think-piecey ones, although I do especially want to do another Crime Tailor segment at some point and have a couple of villains in mind for that) last week and didn’t have time to finish it for that Thursday. Maybe this Thursday if everything goes smoothly. Or not. It depends.

As for the OHOTMU, probably, yes. Rex the Wonder Dog’s awesomeness is not constrained to one universe.

Mitchell Hundred: Does Armond White actually believe all the crazy shit he writes, or is he just trying to garner publicity? I’m really not sure about this.

I think Armond White is a born contrarian, and contrarians are extremely skilled at making themselves believe that the contrary opinions they hold for the sake of being contrary are also correct. Seriously, if Armond White is trying to get publicity, there are much easier ways to do it than by arguing that latter-day Michael Bay films are unrecognized works of genius.

Nicodemus: If you were a flavor of soup, what flavor would it be?

Presumably “mangled flesh” flavour.

Jonathan: Do you have any opinions/insights into the current Alberta election? Does it even have any meaning to you as an Ontarian?

Yes. I said on MetaFilter a couple weeks ago that I thought Danielle Smith – not Wildrose, Smith – represented the future of Canadian small-c conservatism because she was what it needed to be to survive (or at least pretending to be so): fiscally radical-conservative and socially liberal/libertarian. Youth polling in Canada – even in Alberta – makes it quite clear that social conservative positions are wildly unpopular with young voters and that is only trending downwards. Libertarian-conservatism is really the only way for conservatism to truly survive in Canada over the next fifty years, and Danielle Smith was trying to sell Wildrose as being that.

The problem, of course, is that Wildrose was actually chock-full of the usual old white Reform Party psychotics who have always been the backbone of Canada’s far right and once it became obvious that this was the case, the moderates and youth that might have considered voting Wildrose suddenly found they weren’t so interested in voting for Canada’s religious right and went for the Progressive Conservatives, who have moved to a decidely centrist position over the past few years. So generally, I’m quite happy with the results, as Alberta politics seem to have shifted from all-right-wing-all-the-time to a centrist/conservative fight, and that’s a leftward shift in the most conservative province in Canada.

KD: Nearly a year in, what are your thoughts on the DcNU?

I’m reading I, Vampire and that is pretty much it (and I don’t know how long I’ll hang on to reading it). The Nu52 basically killed DC for me – the emotional attachment that I always had to the DCU is still there, but it’s strictly to the old DCU and not this shitty new EXTREEEEEEME version. Really, most of the Nu52 comics are just appallingly bad, and the ones that aren’t are crossing over with the bad ones far too often. But at the end of the day, it’s not about quality but about the fact that my DC comics, the ones I grew up with, have been mostly discarded for something else. Even if they were good comics, I still wouldn’t want to read them, because without the emotional tie they lose all resonance for me. I mean, I’m not even reading Legion of Super-Heroes! This is the first time basically ever that I am not bothering to read Legion. It just feels weird for me to type that, but it’s true.

And look – DC has greatly increased their sales, so good for them, I suppose. But it’s not for me any more. I used to dream of writing for DC; I don’t any more, because it’s quite clear that even if I could get past their abominable treatment of creators (and I don’t think I could), it’s just not a place I’d want to work now.

FLAPJACKS: So, are you gonna get Mass Effect 3 when it comes out?
MGK: No.
FLAPJACKS: Why not?
MGK: Because I didn’t play the first two? Because I’m not gonna play every game that comes out? I don’t have time to play them all. I never played Gears of War or any of the later Grand Theft Autos or anything like that. I’ve been spending the last five months working my way through the Assassin’s Creed franchise and I’m nowhere near close to finished. I got Saints Row The Third on Steam because it was on sale and everybody was saying it was wacky and awesome, and it looks wacky and awesome, but I know I won’t get to it until, like, June or something. If I wanted to get into Mass Effect I would be looking at a time sink of god knows how long. There are only so many hours in the day, and so forth.
FLAPJACKS: But everybody says that Mass Effect is brilliant and visionary and –
MGK: Space zombies.
FLAPJACKS: What?
MGK: Spaze zombies. The third Mass Effect is about space zombies. Oh, sure, call them Reapers or whatever. But it’s space zombies.
FLAPJACKS: Look, your anti-zombie sentiment seems a little hypocritical given that in your comic you’re doing, you recently revealed that some of the bad guys were zombies.
MGK: They’re not zombies. It’s a little bit more complicated than that. But so what if I’m hypocritical? The comic is free. Mass Effect 3 is fifty dollars. I’m sure it’s really entertaining and all, but if “space zombies” is your hook then I think I’m going to wait until it’s on sale on Steam for, like, ten bucks. Should take about six months or so. Maybe Christmas. That’s about what I spent on Dead Space 1 and 2 total, and in those games I could at least stomp the space zombies to death. Because I don’t play these games for the plot most of the time.
FLAPJACKS: But I was under the impression that Mass Effect had an amazing plot. Like, a glorious space opera arc that makes Star Wars look like dogshit. And old Star Wars, not new Star Wars.
MGK: I actually think plotting has gone downhill since Bioware introduced its “you can be good or evil or whatever” system of roleplaying games. I mean, the old stuff they did like Planescape, those were basically stories with which you can interact and twiddle a bit, but you were always locked onto the plot and you were going to be the good guy whether you liked it or not. But now it’s all about choice, which means the games always feel a bit limp to me. It’s entirely possible that Mass Effect is the Tolstoy of video gaming, but I tend to doubt it. Besides, this avoids the more important question, which is if I am going to be able to stomp the space zombies to death in Mass Effect 3? Also, will I get extra points for shooting them in the dick like I did in Bulletstorm?
FLAPJACKS: That was a great game. I have to admit, I was really impressed with the lengths they took to justify why the game would reward you for shooting bad guys in the dick. “Because the military likes it when you shoot people in the dick” would not have been how I would have explained it, but there you go.
MGK: No, I suspect Mass Effect 3 will be extremely serious about the space zombies, because everything I’ve seen from that series bunches into either “we are taking this very seriously” or “here is a brief segue so we can be wacky for a second and then we’re going right back to it being all serious.” God knows that Twitter feed they set up so that they could hype the game by having a Twitter RP session was about as fun as something that is the opposite of fun.
FLAPJACKS: Look, you didn’t know Emily Wong like Mass Effect fans did. I bet she was really important and having her die in a text message was very meaningful.
MGK: I admit I’m stating this from relative ignorance. Maybe if you play as Female Shepherd – and god if I hear one more nerd jizz his pants over “FemShep” I will cut them, because barely having seen any of her I am already sick of her – instead of having laser fights the aliens fight each other by, I dunno, can-can dancing. Or silly walk jousting. Maybe one of the sidekicks you get in every Bioware game fights with a giant caber that is made out of lightsabers. All of this could be true! But I doubt it. It just doesn’t feel like that sort of game.
FLAPJACKS: How would you even carry a giant caber made of lightsabers?
MGK: That’s for the details people to work out. I’m an idea man. But if Mass Effect games play anything like everything else Bioware makes, then I’m already less inclined to play them, because I am so sick of Bioware “go here, get a thing, now go here and get another thing” RPGs. You know what I miss? Baldur’s Gate. Screw this two-sidekicks crap. I want a party of fucking adventurers and the computer rolling dice for me and not even trying to hide the fact, that’s what I want.
FLAPJACKS: They’re apparently redoing that game or something. There was a big hubbub on the net last week.
MGK: I am curious to see if they screw with it or just intelligently decide to reproduce it in HD or something.
FLAPJACKS: What if they turn it into a modern Bioware game?
MGK: Then we will go blow shit up.

So Kotaku unveiled what is likely the setting/hero/etc. for Assassin’s Creed III, and online reaction seems divided into two camps:

1.) The idea of an Assassin operating during the American Revolution is awesome;
2.) But what about Desmond?

Afterall, the overarcing plot of the Assassin’s Creed story demands an awesome epic conclusion with Desmond in 2012. But this is an example of how video game writing can be constrained by the gameplay, which is relatively unique to video games.

The problem with a Desmond-centred storyline isn’t a problem with Desmond himself. Some people don’t like his character, and I agree he comes across as whiny in the original Assassin’s Creed, but the following games flesh him out and make him more appealing (and his white hoodie is a nice modern equivalent of the Assassin robes). It’s not Desmond’s character that makes him unsuitable as the primary character in the next game in the series.

No, the issue with Desmond is that at this point in the series, Assassin’s Creed, as a family of games, does certain things. And one of the things that makes it mostly impossible to do what it does are automatic weapons, because while sneaking around and stabbing people and getting into awesome swordfights is terrific, it’s all more or less rendered obsolete by firearms. Indeed, the end sequence in Assassin’s Creed II, where Desmond has to fight his way through a bunch of Templars with the wrist blade, makes absolutely no sense. Why do none of the Templars have guns? Heck, why don’t any of them have so much as a frigging taser?

This is not to say that eventually we might see an AC game where the protagonist exists in an era where there are reliable guns. But it would demand being a wildly different game from the existing franchise in many ways. Arguably, Assassin’s Creed III‘s American Revolution setting is about as far forward as you can go in time and still use most of the existing gameplay of the franchise: multiple-shot rifles and pistols start showing up a few generations later, and realistically that’s the ball game for stabbing people as a raison d’etre. “All men are created equal – Sam Colt made them that way” isn’t just a cute saying: for Assassin’s Creed it’s the obelisk standing before the cavemen.

If you put Ezio Auditore in the Wild West, he would be one dead Italian pretty damn fast. And Ubisoft isn’t going to fuck with how the franchise plays in the final game of their flagship trilogy which, in best Douglas Adams fashion, is now five games long.

A lot of board games come out every year. Some of them are really great. Many of them are okay rehashes of what has come before. Some are crappy. And some are just sort of there. This post is dedicated to the last category.

Tobago came out a couple of years ago and was immediately very popular; it’s a weird puzzle game where players gradually winnow down the number of possible sites where treasure can exist on an island, and then race to get the treasures. It has an interesting set of mechanics and is reasonably interactive (which is key for me, because I hate multiplayer-solitaire games like Agricola – seriously, I could write a thousand words easily on how much I fucking hate Agricola, but that is for another day). But when it is suggested, my response is always “eh.” Tobago doesn’t really feel very competitive to me – in a three- or four-player game, it’s far too easy for a player to scavenge wins based on little more than turn order and a bit of luck. It’s just sort of there. The pieces are cute and I suppose it’s a good gateway game to get people to heavier stuff, but there are plenty of good games to get people to heavier stuff that are better than Tobago – not least because Tobago isn’t really like anything else. That should be a plus in its favour, but it isn’t, because it feels so inessential to me. I mean, when I teach Stone Age – another light game I don’t particularly like – I can at least try to push people to try Caylus eventually, or one of the other half-dozen really good worker placement games out there. But Tobago doesn’t really link to anything.

Fresco is a worker-placement game that can at least lead to better experiences, but I dislike it. It has one clever mechanic – “waking up” your workers earlier means you get initiative for the best slot placements, but it makes your workers less happy which in turn means you gradually get less actions. That’s a clever initiative system and I wish it had been better implemented in this game, where I rarely see worker happiness matter overly – and that’s really my beef with Fresco, which is so very straightforward a game. You get cubes, you turn them into other (more important) cubes, and then you trade in the cubes for points. Too many modern Euro-style boardgames are about trading cubes for other cubes. (In this game, the cubes are supposed to be paint. But really. They’re cubes.) Fresco fails for me, because in attempting to be accessible it fails to really be a game. It’s just a pretty straightforward expanding economy game – get A to get B to get C.

But what’s worst are the ones I really, really want to be good. I was waiting eagerly to play Pret-a-Porter because the theme is so awesome – you’re competing fashion design moguls! Come on, that is a great theme for a boardgame. If I play one more game where I am a merchant in historical Europe I may shoot myself. (Or, more practically, I might shoot other people. I mean, come on. There is only one of me, and so many other people. This is logical, see.) But Pret-a-Porter did not live up to my hopes. It’s a worker-placement game with an economic theme – you’re buying buildings and hiring employees to get more clothing designs and materials so you can present the biggest and best collections at fashion shows.

In practice, the game is a very complex set of steps – buy business resources (A) to assist you in getting designs (B) and raw materials (C) so you can complete sets of clothing (D) which generate you money (E) and victory points (F), the latter being determined by special categories of attributes which you can also earn from the buildings and employees as well as other areas on the board (G) but the victory points also earn you money (back to E) and you need the money to buy the resources and materials in the first place (back to A and C). Furthermore, the game has not one but TWO different ways to borrow money – the “on purpose” way which is reasonably easy and straightforward for a player to play back, and the “emergency loanshark” way which is not. The employees and buildings all do appropriate things (for example, the PR person gives you additional VPs when you come in third or fourth in a category). Really, this game has a ton of clever ideas.

But they don’t work. Because the employees and buildings – which are really the core of the game, as you need them to build your efficiency engine – show up randomly every turn and initiative shifts on a preset order, there is no real way to sacrifice to guarantee to get what you want or need. Which means that the essential parts of the game are essentially doled out to players at random, which would be fine in a lighter game, but this is a game with at least four levels of mental accounting. Which means that you’re brainburning on a game which doesn’t reward you for it. I have no problems with four levels of mental accounting if the game respects the work I’m doing to make it work, but Pret-a-Porter just doesn’t. And that sucks, because I really wanted this to work.

See also: Core Worlds. I’m kind of burned out on Dominion lately, and I’d really like to see a great deckbuilding game take Dominion’s ideas and run with them. None of the wannabes have done so – most have not even come close. Core Worlds was advertised as Dominion with space-empire building, which seemed like a slam dunk. I love Eclipse, but want a quick-and-dirty space game. Something that does what Race For The Galaxy does, except in a deckbuilding context. Core Worlds seemed like that thing! Except, of course, it wasn’t.

See, Core Worlds is another game where turn order is determined by the first player changing every round (the person on your left is first player next round). And you draw replacement cards into the pool randomly from the deck. These cards are either troops and ships, who can earn you the two types of “currencies” in the game (ground-fighting and space-fighting, basically) which let you conquer planets. Simple – except that since the planets are also dealt out randomly, it is quite possible to, for example, have a situation where all of the planets need starfighters, and you never get a starfighter because on your turn to go first there are no starfighters and on other people’s turns they buy the starfighters before you get a chance, so you basically sit there having lost the game in the first couple of turns and that is that. Core Worlds is an example of terrible game design, because when a game can assfuck you on a totally arbitrary basis from the very start of the game, that is a bad idea. Many deckbuilders have also made this same mistake, but their mistake has been to incorporate more complex ideas than the deckbuilding mechanic can handle. Core Worlds is relatively simple and still fucked it up.

I don’t want to look at the pretty landscape, no matter how gorgeous it may be, graphics-wise; I want to play a game, and if I have to spend twenty minutes looking at pretty landscape in order to play the next part of the game, I will decide to play some other game.

Pro Wrestling Tycoon. Forget the many sports wrestling games out there, where you play a wrestler who is wrestling – those almost never capture the spirit of the thing. It’s always “well, here’s a match, wrestle the match.” But pro wrestling is so much more than that – and the challenge factor of successfully running a wrestling company so much higher than that of simply winning a match in any case.

The actual engine wouldn’t have to be too difficult: after all, pro wrestling writing mostly depends on a number of scenarios that only vary mildly (the basic feud, the friends-split-up-and-become-enemies, the formation of a heel stable, etc.). You could probably come up with about forty or so possible mini-plots and the player could mix and match them to best effect. In terms of the wrestlers themselves, you could assign ratings for various traits – some for interviews and acting ability (acting ability, improvisational ability, charisma) and some for wrestling ability (selling, execution of moves, large moveset, ability to resist injury) and then some X-factors (motivating factors which make the wrestler happy – some want money, some want outside-of-wrestling-fame, some want to only wrestle great matches, etc.; as well as how much the wrestler demands in salary). You could also do something like how baseball-manager games do and as wrestlers age their traits can shift (and not always simply a decrease, either). And, if you were being honest to the spirit of the thing, there would be the occasional tragic death.

Once you get past the wrestlers, you can start to consider the audience and business models as well. How do you negotiate TV deals? What does your audience demand, and does it vary from city to city? How much money does your company spend on pyrotechnics? What PPV schedule will you use? How do you deal with competing wrestling companies – cooperation deals like the old territory system or WWF/ECW in the late 90s, or total bloodthirsty competition a la the Monday Night Wars? Hell, you could even timeshift scenarios – managing a wrestling promotion in the 1960s-1970s was a totally different ballgame than managing one in the 1980s or today. Put together an “exodus” challenge to mimic the business challenges of losing a number of your top young stars to your chief rival – how do you stay afloat?

The only problem is I don’t see how you would account for events like the Montreal Screwjob or other things that exist only in wrestling and are one-off, non-duplicable events. Which is part of the reason wrestling is the way it is, I suppose, but make the tycoon game that much harder to design.